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The increasing adoption of Reinforcement Learning in safety-critical systems domains such as autonomous vehicles, health, and aviation raises the need for ensuring their safety. Existing safety mechanisms such as adversarial training,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-11-11 Paulina Stevia Nouwou Mindom , Amin Nikanjam , Foutse Khomh , John Mullins

The alignment of autonomous agents with human values is a pivotal challenge when deploying these agents within physical environments, where safety is an important concern. However, defining the agent's objective as a reward and/or cost…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-12-15 Mattijs Baert , Sam Leroux , Pieter Simoens

We introduce a simple but effective method for managing risk in model-based reinforcement learning with trajectory sampling that involves probabilistic safety constraints and balancing of optimism in the face of epistemic uncertainty and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-09-12 Marin Vlastelica , Sebastian Blaes , Cristina Pineri , Georg Martius

Reinforcement Learning (RL) controllers have generated excitement within the control community. The primary advantage of RL controllers relative to existing methods is their ability to optimize uncertain systems independently of explicit…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-12-07 Max Mowbray , Panagiotis Petsagkourakis , Ehecatl Antonio del Río Chanona , Dongda Zhang

Safety is a critical feature of controller design for physical systems. When designing control policies, several approaches to guarantee this aspect of autonomy have been proposed, such as robust controllers or control barrier functions.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-02-26 Miguel Calvo-Fullana , Luiz F. O. Chamon , Santiago Paternain

Safety is one of the biggest concerns to applying reinforcement learning (RL) to the physical world. In its core part, it is challenging to ensure RL agents persistently satisfy a hard state constraint without white-box or black-box…

Robotics · Computer Science 2023-10-19 Weiye Zhao , Tairan He , Changliu Liu

The desire to use reinforcement learning in safety-critical settings has inspired a recent interest in formal methods for learning algorithms. Existing formal methods for learning and optimization primarily consider the problem of…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2019-06-05 Nathan Fulton , Andre Platzer

In reinforcement learning, classic on-policy evaluation methods often suffer from high variance and require massive online data to attain the desired accuracy. Previous studies attempt to reduce evaluation variance by searching for or…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-03-21 Claire Chen , Shuze Daniel Liu , Shangtong Zhang

Safe deployment of autonomous robots in diverse scenarios requires agents that are capable of efficiently adapting to new environments while satisfying constraints. In this work, we propose a practical and theoretically-justified approach…

Robotics · Computer Science 2022-02-17 Thomas Lew , Apoorva Sharma , James Harrison , Andrew Bylard , Marco Pavone

Many practical applications of online reinforcement learning require the satisfaction of safety constraints while learning about the unknown environment. In this work, we establish theoretical foundations for reinforcement learning with…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-04-30 Benjamin Schiffer , Lucas Janson

Reinforcement Learning (RL) agents have great successes in solving tasks with large observation and action spaces from limited feedback. Still, training the agents is data-intensive and there are no guarantees that the learned behavior is…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2021-10-20 Helge Spieker

Reinforcement learning (RL) has revolutionized decision-making across a wide range of domains over the past few decades. Yet, deploying RL policies in real-world scenarios presents the crucial challenge of ensuring safety. Traditional safe…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2024-03-26 Lunet Yifru , Ali Baheri

Reinforcement learning policies are typically represented by black-box neural networks, which are non-interpretable and not well-suited for safety-critical domains. To address both of these issues, we propose constrained normalizing flow…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-05-03 Finn Rietz , Erik Schaffernicht , Stefan Heinrich , Johannes A. Stork

We propose an automata-theoretic approach for reinforcement learning (RL) under complex spatio-temporal constraints with time windows. The problem is formulated using a Markov decision process under a bounded temporal logic constraint.…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2023-08-01 Xiaoshan Lin , Abbasali Koochakzadeh , Yasin Yazicioglu , Derya Aksaray

Amidst the growing demand for implementing advanced control and decision-making algorithms|to enhance the reliability, resilience, and stability of power systems|arises a crucial concern regarding the safety of employing machine learning…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2025-07-25 Amr S. Mohamed , Emily Nguyen , Deepa Kundur

Real-world reinforcement learning (RL) problems often demand that agents behave safely by obeying a set of designed constraints. We address the challenge of safe RL by coupling a safety guide based on model predictive control (MPC) with a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-03-30 Samuel Pfrommer , Tanmay Gautam , Alec Zhou , Somayeh Sojoudi

Reinforcement learning has been successfully used to solve difficult tasks in complex unknown environments. However, these methods typically do not provide any safety guarantees during the learning process. This is particularly problematic,…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2019-07-02 Torsten Koller , Felix Berkenkamp , Matteo Turchetta , Joschka Boedecker , Andreas Krause

Multi-task reinforcement learning trains generalist policies that can execute multiple tasks. While recent years have seen significant progress, existing approaches rarely provide formal performance guarantees, which are indispensable when…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-03 Yannik Schnitzer , Mathias Jackermeier , Alessandro Abate , David Parker

Characterizing aleatoric and epistemic uncertainty on the predicted rewards can help in building reliable reinforcement learning (RL) systems. Aleatoric uncertainty results from the irreducible environment stochasticity leading to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-06-06 Bertrand Charpentier , Ransalu Senanayake , Mykel Kochenderfer , Stephan Günnemann

We investigate the important problem of certifying stability of reinforcement learning policies when interconnected with nonlinear dynamical systems. We show that by regulating the input-output gradients of policies, strong guarantees of…

Systems and Control · Computer Science 2018-10-30 Ming Jin , Javad Lavaei